This article is drawn from the presentation by Tony White, Global Head of Allianz University, at the insurance giant Allianz, to a recent online forum of senior learning and development professionals convened by ECLF as part of their Spring series of events for members on ‘Designing Learning Ecosystems’.

Tony White shared his company’s recent initiatives on growing a voluntary learning mindset across the organization. It was clear from the subsequent discussion that the challenges and experiences that Allianz’s learning and development team encountered were very familiar to plenty of other organizations too.

2016 saw the company review its learning strategy across all its 150,000 employees. The review focused on the awareness that while the central group L&D function was made up of only eight people, the majority of L&D initiatives were designed and implemented in the different divisions and departments around the world that employed over 350 people. This meant that there was an inevitable duplication of work in the separate divisions and geographies, which reduced efficiency in delivery. White was very aware that the last thing that was needed was increased centralized control from group HR, but equally believed efficiencies could be made, and so asked the question ‘How could things be more effectively co-ordinated across all the divisions?’.

Create opportunities for those 'islands of excellence teams to share and highlight their best practice with the rest of the organization

With the ‘drive for lifelong learning and personal and professional growth’ as the clear main objective, White and his team set about redesigning the L&D approach to leverage its global scale while crucially maintaining its local touch.

At the heart of their new approach was to make learning available for all, (democratising learning) identify ‘islands of excellence’ across the group, and then create opportunities for those ‘islands of excellence’ teams to share and highlight their best practice with the rest of the organization. At first, teams were reluctant to come forward and share their successes, but by cleverly playing on the human desire to be acknowledged for good work well done, they encouraged more people to come forward with their successes too, to gain recognition across the group.

Another thread White and his team used to gain momentum within the learning community was to increase the accessibility and engagement of the L&D offering. This could be with something as trivial-sounding as lightening the mood around messaging, by peppering them with rubbish ‘dad-jokes’. “What did the blanket say when it fell on the floor? …. Oh, sheet!”. This approachable, less threatening ambiance may seem trite but it ‘brought people in’ says White.

Ultimately, the challenge for the group function was that they were trying to get all parts of the organization, not just the L&D side, to embrace and relax your tight grip on the process, so that you ‘lose control to gain control’.

“People come when you lose control, they share needs and solutions more openly” he noted, and this allows the group function to gain more data and insight and so perform its most valuable function, which is to then make connections. Putting people with a need in touch with those with a solution, or pairing-up teams who are searching for the same thing to work together brings those efficiencies and synergies to the fore, and leverages the pockets of expertise that exist in all organizations to deliver much more widely for the benefit of all adding both organizational value as well as the glow of recognition and impact for the 'islands of excellence' teams who are leading the initiatives.

"No learning is bad learning. Learning encourages learning"

The ‘lose control to gain control’ approach is something that needs to be worked hard at. It does not come easily to those who have worked hard previously to get to those positions of control. Why give it away? But the rewards are clear with less direct control, trust increases, and transparency follows. And from that transparency the connections can be made, and value-added.

The group function did institute some group-wide changes though. The core LMS system (SAP’s SuccessFactors) was supplemented by a learning experience platform (Degreed), as they saw the latter to be more user-friendly with its preferred user experience. This was prefaced in 2017 by signing a contract with LinkedIn Learning and making it available across the group. This was the first truly global digital learning offering in Allianz and has greatly helped in changing the approach to learning at scale in Allianz.

LinkedIn Learning brought some issues though primarily that it has a massive range of content and Allianz users were able to access any of it. This led to an initial concern that they had ‘lost control’ too emphatically. The most accessed program for the first few months was on ‘body language for leaders’, which was not what White and senior executives would have hoped people would focus on. White, however, reminded himself and his team ‘to trust the process, and the wisdom of the crowd would begin to work’, and over time that has been the case with more focus on Digital, Data, and Customer related skills.

He also was of the mindset that initially “we didn’t care what they were learning, we just wanted them to build the habit of learning…. recommending content would come later.”

This habit has been seen to develop. In the most recent quarter, over 800,000 LinkedIn Learning videos have been watched by Allianz staff, and 86% of those to complete. There is no compulsion to use LinkedIn Learning, it is all voluntary. “Voluntary drives adoption” he has seen. What is more, a full 20% of this has been on mobile devices, so most probably away from the desk, at times when formal content consumption would never have happened previously.

Another group-wide change was the re-branding of all the divisional L&D activity into a common Allianz style and format, under the brand of Allianz. This was difficult to do and meant giving up some long-held practices for some of the learning teams, but they came to appreciate, that when there was a consistent ‘look & feel’ they were able to share their content more effectively outside of their division and across the whole group, increasing its impact and gaining them global reach.

A recent initiative from the board of Allianz was to introduce the concept of 1-hour-a-week for learning This would help promote lifelong learning within the group as well as provide a dedicated time for employees to Up and Re-skill themselves.

In terms of encouraging the individual learners to engage more with the content and opportunities that were being made available to them, they promoted the idea of the ‘conscious learner’. This underpinned the notion that learning builds strength, not just individually but for the team and organization too. If you learn, you appreciate the value of investing in yourself.

White recounted the conversation with a senior investment advisor who said he could not afford 1-hour-a-week, to which White responded, “If you left Allianz suddenly, through an accident or your own choice, would Allianz survive?” the answer was obvious, and so the allocation of 1-hours-week began to seem more do-able.

The discussion between White and the ECLF attendees was enthusiastic and excited the similarities of the challenges were clear across many other large enterprises in a multitude of sectors, and many of White’s solutions were seen as applicable and sensible in their organizations.

One large chemical manufacturer had recently made a similar transition to Degreed at the front end with LinkedIn Learning content behind. An executive from a global airline saw themselves on the same journey, though a little behind after the difficulties in the airline sector through the pandemic. While a competitor in the insurance space, unsurprisingly also recognized much in White’s presentation.

Discussion also explored the pragmatic problem of how to measure effectiveness, and the debate around being ‘future fit’ and the value of reskilling and upskilling. This was all part of the ‘losing control’ motif, “no learning is bad learning” stressed White, “learning encourages learning.”